Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  Asami and her devotees were waiting for me after school. I was on bathroom cleaning duty, so they nearly drowned me in the toilet. Here’s something else people need to understand: kids buy curses like arcade tokens—some of them counterfeit, sure, but others real. Asami did the sort of stuff you wouldn’t do to anyone unless you knew they couldn’t stick you with a visit from Hanako-san. But I held it together in the toilet bowl; Yurie would have been proud of me. I told myself this was nothing, nothing in comparison to what she’d been put through. My feet slipped on the tiles as Asami rifled through my purse, looking for “spending money” that she didn’t need and I didn’t have.

  “You’re paying your due right now, freak,” Asami said. “For talking back to me.”

  At Rika Yamazaki’s grave, I had wished for my father to find eternal rest in that great vinyl office chair in the sky. I didn’t want him returned even though I heard my mother cry at night. With the earth being shaken and stabbed and poisoned at every turn—mad cow, mad bird, mad people—he was better off making his peace with the other side. His suffering had ended. Good.

  The beauty of psychic energy—the reason my father worshipped the state recommendations—is that protection is nearly impossible. A psychic attack, the public service announcements explained, is like a natural disaster. There’s no kicking it back. That’s why the cheerful cartoon ghost on the PSAs chirps that “The best way to protect yourself is to be a good person!” And some preliminary studies have hinted that the rate of infidelity is decreasing because cheating hearts are afraid of waking up fused to their lovers. We’re not turning into better people, but our retribution is getting closer.

  Of course, real life isn’t that simple because some people will always be able to pay for the impossible, and if there’s one thing talent’s drawn to, it’s artillery and armory. We’re doing well. We’re killing ourselves off at record speed. And a very few of us—a lucky, golden few—have the means to hurt without repercussion, to escape the judgment of peers, to skate above this shitty, brutal world. Internet chatter says the Prime Minister has a talisman or else he never could have dissolved Parliament twice, and common sense says the Emperor surely has one, too. And so did Asami Ogino, third-year high school girl in western Tokyo. I wondered how her parents decided to buy her one—had she bitten other babies? Or did they just want to give their little princess every advantage?

  This is what I thought about while I sat in the auditorium waiting for the choral concert to start. This is what I thought about so I wouldn’t think about the fact that I was going to kill the star soloist.

  I had already promised Yurie. I’d been sitting in the library, searching yearbooks for pictures of Asami and checking for the necklace—the tiny sun cloaked in clouds—when Yurie’s pale bloody hand snaked over my shoulder. I remembered painting those nails sky-blue when blood still ran under the skin instead of on top of it. And now I couldn’t even look her in the eye because I knew she’d seen hell.

  “I told you I’d never let you down,” I said, although this was the first time I was sure about that. “But once I do this, you’ll be gone forever.” She would never hurtle us down another hill on a bicycle death ride. She would never curse me out again, just like she would never forgive me anymore of my weaknesses. She would never ask me to do anything else to win a war or live my life.

  Yurie squeezed—not hard, but all softness was gone from her—and whispered, static from a pirate radio, “Come with me to the beautiful land.”

  The weight of the world, of Yurie and my crying mother and my years upon years of unhappiness, tumbled onto my shoulders, and for a second, my spine caved, heaving, toward my dead blood-sister. I was so furious at her for doing this terrible thing, for forcing me to help, for abandoning me to struggle on alone in a world that no one would admit was a post-apocalypse. “Not yet,” I said. I couldn’t say I was afraid of hell. Knowing Yurie, she’d just try to convince me.

  It turns out that it’s true what they say about being on stage: the audience disappears into a void. You feel them watching, but really it’s just you and your demons doing battle. Asami was a million-dollar angel up there with the stage-light halo and the talismanic necklace blazing like an open wound, but I like to think that, when she saw me step out of the dark and into the hot bath of incandescent light, she realized that retribution was on its way.

  I knocked her down—her head hit the floor with an ugly clunk—and dug my fingers under the necklace, scraping the mortal flesh of her soft perfumed neck. Asami was spitting in my eyes, yanking my hair, but I won. I wasn’t stronger. I wasn’t tougher. But I took bigger risks because I had nothing else to lose. Yurie—Yurie had been the last thing. The necklace unclasped in my hands, and instantly, the fire left Asami’s face—her eyes softened, her teeth vanished. The little deer had seen death. I rolled away just before the roof of the world opened up and hell rained down upon her.

  I looked for Yurie in the torrent of red and black liquid lightning gushing in and out of Asami’s ribs, but there were no faces in the storm. No faces at the end of the world. Not even Asami, by the end, had much of a face. But if I strained, if I blocked out the yelps and sobs, I could pick Yurie’s mezzo-soprano voice out of the demon chorus. She was the only one singing in the blood.

  “Girl, I love you, too,” I whispered.

  I’m holding Asami’s choker over a trashcan fire. I’ve been wearing it for the past two months; it might be the only thing keeping me alive. Asami’s family has connections—that’s how they got the talisman. So a demon-horde might be hanging over my head right now, waiting for my shield to lift.

  Now I can see why Asami was so impassive, so callous: the necklace submerges you in a viscous superfluid, and everything else becomes virtual, dreamy, distant. The world’s your doll house; nothing matters, and nothing moves you. Once I tossed a cigarette over my shoulder in a park and an old man on litter duty cursed me with an enchanted megaphone—but nothing happened, so I lit another. Maybe burning other people’s raw nerves was Asami’s only access to the live wire of emotion. I know I’ve caught myself forgetting that this fishbowl is not reality and the true world is spinning on without me.

  I drop the necklace in the fire, and soon amber flames are skating across black metal. Each flame is its own nuclear devil—an undead spirit, an undying wheel—racing alone down a freshly-tarred highway. I’ve been dreaming about hell and the beautiful land even without Yurie’s guidance—I still miss her, but I know she’s waiting for me on the burning plain. Sometimes I hope I’ll see Asami beside her, finally holding her hand—blood-sisters of a different kind. Other times, I hope it’ll be years before I see either of them. The necklace starts to smoke, and I start to count. I’ve vowed to stand in the open for three minutes before going back to my mother’s dinner table. With Asami, it had only taken ten seconds. I pass that mark. I pass it three times. Four times.

  Then I hear a noise like a flock of gulls diving into a sea. I turn.

  The Castaway

  Sergio Gaut vel Hartman

  translated by Carmen Ruggero

  I had lived inside that body for over sixty years, and it was very difficult for me to accept this new state of being, one in which the body can be discarded after use like an empty, useless vessel.

  “What are you going to do with … it?” I didn’t know what to call it; we had been one for a long time. The bio-technician shrugged his shoulders; surely, he would answer the same question several times a day, every day.

  “We stick them in the depository for the discarded. It’s possible that some of the organs could be used, although … I don’t believe that’s the case with this one. How was the liver? Did it smoke?”

  “Does that mean you freeze them?” I didn’t answer his questions directly; in fact, I found them offensive. My ignorance on the subject flashed a red signal. I was afraid to know. From the day the transfer took place, I was ruthlessly bombarded by images of freezers shaped as coffins piled up in dark wa
rehouses.

  “Freeze them?” The man gave me a puzzled look. “Why would we go through that kind of trouble? We connect them to feeding tubes and leave them until their clock stops.”

  “Their clock stops!” A beautiful and ruthless metaphor. “They continue living …” I sighed.

  The idea that my old body was rotting in a foul-smelling depository while I started a new life seemed insane. What kind of a monster have I become? I thought.

  “Living, what is implied by living …” said the bio-technician, “is a ventured guess. Not in principle, but the vegetative functions are not extinguished in the transfer; flashes of memory linger on—traces from their youth are not completely erased. They are quite alive, I suppose, although as you know, no longer officially considered, people.”

  “Quite alive,” I repeated his words. “Like being a ‘little pregnant’; isn’t that sufficient enough to deserve respect, support, consolation, and affection?”

  “You are completely crazy!” yelled the bio-technician. “Instead of enjoying your new body, you lament the luck of the old one. Are you similarly attached to each Coke bottle you empty? Let me tell you: the road you’re on leads to hell.”

  I inhaled deeply and tightened my fists. “That’s exactly what I thought until a little while ago, before finding out that my old body continued to live.”

  “Would you rather we had killed him? Because … as far as I know, bodies do not die without the aid of cancer or cardiac arrest or pulmonary edema or …”

  I left the guy talking to himself while I disappeared through the labyrinth of Korps’ corridors. I walked for hours, reflecting on the second crucial transformation of my life.

  It took several days for me to accept my new body, and when it began to feel natural for me to be thirty years old, someone who could have been my grandfather would suddenly come out of nowhere demanding payment of a bill. A bill for what? Had I broken something? He didn’t have the right to demand anything, I reflected. He lived what was normal to live. And I will live until I feel like dying.

  I had accidentally walked into the depository but didn’t discover the magnitude of my mistake until it was too late to correct it. What I thought to be a utility room filled with used instruments and old furniture turned out to be the place where they kept the discarded bodies. All of them, the majority belonging to old, frail men deteriorating before my eyes, lay on canvas cots facing the door.

  There were a hundred, maybe a thousand cots not necessarily arranged in any particular order and barely visible inside the grim ambiance of the depository where they waited with indifference for that jump into space. Their trembling faces, withered by the endless wait, showed the outflow of blood from their bodies. I had fallen in the middle of someone else’s nightmare.

  Seeing the plastic tubes connected to their trachea and sunken veins of their forearms was a most disgusting experience. The wasting human bodies appeared to struggle to free themselves from their restraints although there was no good reason for it. Even when the need for transfer was not visibly drawn on their faces, one could see their resignation and indifference as they submitted to the lost world.

  I had overcome my first impulse to get out of there, and predisposed to accept my role in the process I chose to undergo, I glanced through the room looking for the one I had been. I found it impossible to think about him as someone else—some stranger—separate and different from me. Perhaps, that was the reason why it took me forever to identify him. My gaze bypassed him as I couldn’t distinguish his inert silhouette from the others in the depository.

  I proceeded slowly for fear that any abrupt movement could trigger a wave of protests, but the truth was that the bodies ignored me. Only a few expressed their annoyance at the intrusion by clumsily moving their hands and so entangling them in the plastic tubing.

  Finally, when I managed to get through all the obstacles separating me from my old body and I could look at him face to face, my mind drew a blank. I tried unsuccessfully to tell him how I felt; to say something by way of an apology, but I found myself so inhibited by its rigidity, its impassiveness, its stillness, and to my amazement, it was he who broke silence.

  “I was expecting you,” said my ex-body in a thread of a voice.

  “You were expecting me?” I imagined myself waiting, unable to dream, much less hope for a sunset, or the one responsible for putting me through such gratuitous pain. I also felt guilty because my presence there happened by chance.

  “You did not come by chance,” he said, as if able to read my thoughts, “… and I do not read your thoughts; somehow we go on being the same person.”

  His words tingled in the air. It was clear he felt more like me than I did. There was memory, but … there was also a body. The same body that held me from the beginning is now condemned because speculation had it he was the one who plotted the outcome. But when I tried objecting to that logic, the words adamantly refused to come out. I knew what he was thinking; he had waited patiently and calmly to show me he still controlled my destiny.

  The scene was peculiarly similar to an earlier experience when my parents decided that I had to say goodbye to a dying grandfather, a stranger to me. The old man made me feel responsible for his death, as if my youth had somehow caused his departure.

  I heard a hopeless cry from another body crawling across the room. That is how they go, I thought, with a moan that fades as they discover they will not be rescued this time.

  “I will moan like that when I leave,” said my first body. “We all do it. It is like a ship’s siren as it casts off from shore.”

  Once again, I was unable to respond. Who is the castaway? I wondered. Did the ship go past the island without giving warning signals?

  I looked at the feeding tubes that joined the body to the tanks and suppressed a deep urge to pull them out. It is preferable to suffocate than to wait without hope for rescue. And once more, my ex-body stripped me of my thoughts.

  “Perhaps I am not the castaway,” he said.

  “I have all my life ahead of me,” I protested. “It’s a new beginning, right?” The lack of conviction in my words was mirrored by a clumsy and incomplete movement of my hand like a stroke of affection that suddenly becomes an angry blow.

  He shrugged his shoulders, showing indifference, while gazing at the bodies dying around us. “To begin anew, yes,” he said, “but not from the very beginning. The memory of those who come to say goodbye to their discarded bodies will forever hold the images from this depository.”

  “What is that supposed to mean? Are you reproaching me?” I was suddenly disgusted by his attitude. Was he trying to entangle me into something? He—we—were condemned: the doctors said it was a question of days, weeks at the most. There was no way out but to go through with the transfer. My old body had put me on the defensive. An invisible net dulled my senses, I felt as if paralyzed.

  “No one forced you to come,” said my old body. “Why not just enjoy the freedom a healthy body offers you for the first time in a long time? It would have been the most logical thing to do. But instead, you felt compelled to pay back a debt to avoid future self-recrimination. It seems like a good idea to me. I would have done the same.”

  Those last words brought back a memory: a cunning ease for cruel irony, a talent I was proud to possess. Would I be able to conserve it, I wondered, in my relationship with lifelong friends? As in a game, too many options began to unfold, but the strategy for handling them wasn’t at all clear to me. Was I to move away from all that was familiar? Was I to seek different people, a different ambiance, leave the planet?

  “I ended up here by accident,” I said, feeling disheartened.

  “Yes,” my ex-body seemed to have lost interest in the conversation. Or maybe, the pain he had suffered silently had returned. I knew a lot about that pain. He moaned again. The agony spread like a wave of electricity from one body to the other. The sound, gray and flat, dissipated throughout the depository.

  The
re was nothing else to be said or done—nothing else to think about or feel. It was time to leave that place.

  But I didn’t do it. The body had accepted my irresponsibility with the utterance of a hollow word meant to defuse any future argument from me. So great was the tension created by his obligatory yes that all I could do to break it was to extend my hand and lightly touch his dry cheek with my fingertips. My old body shook as if having received an electrical discharge.

  “What did you do?” he asked, turning his face away from me.

  “Nothing. I think I just tried to be kind.”

  “You’re afraid—very much so.”

  The accusation was harsh; it transcended simple translation. But then I heard two moans: one was low and sinister; the other was high-pitched like the chirping of a bird. There are many ways of dying, I supposed.

  “Afraid? Of what? “I asked him.

  “There are many ways of dying,” my ex-body repeated my exact words but with an obvious slant. I ignored it. Anyway, I no longer knew what our dialogue meant; I had lost the meaning and perhaps even interest in our conversation. I found myself hypnotized by the colors of the plastic tubes: red, blue, green.

  “I am not the one connected to the tubes,” I said.

  “They are useless,” said my old body, “just something to impress the visitors. It’s just a good show to affect the psyche of the transferred one; something to improve the outcome.”

  “Useless? I thought they were being fed through the tubes.”

  “That, they do,” said my old body. “They are useless because it makes no difference whether they feed us or let us starve to death. We will not leave this place because they have stopped our medication, and they only come into the depository three times a day to gather the corpses.”

  I told him it was cruel, but there was no other way to do it. “It’s not possible to wait for the first body to die; the transfer could not be carried out if we had.”